


The Dollar Prince

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-16
Updated: 2020-02-16
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:22:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22753939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: She is the granddaughter of an ancient and fallen royal house, an empress without an empire in a modern age that has no need for such titles; he is the grandson who inherits - and then loses - a corporate empire, without the title of emperor to define it, in a modern age that recognizes wealth as a sufficient crown.The fact that they are contractually obligated to marry is a funny little quirk, but it may prove pleasantly surprising.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 27
Kudos: 230





	The Dollar Prince

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to the prompt "Modern Royals AU" on tumblr, for the lovely @fitzwilliamsdarcy

…

1.

She is an empress without an empire, which sounds like the opening line of a riddle but is in fact the plain reality that lends her life both its rigid repetition and its vast, wandering solitude.

You can find the country on an old map, if you look. Rey certainly does; it is usually colored pink or yellow and accompanied by a list of exports, a description of its native flora and fauna, the date of its foundation and the date of its fracture into separate pieces, and often there will also be a phonetic guide to how one pronounces the name of the nation’s last royal house, as in rhyming with _Constantine._

She is a girl with a Westminster accent scavenged from the radio plays they listen to in the orphanage where she grows up, a name borrowed from the great-great grandmother of King David by the priest who baptized her in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital when she was abandoned there at eight days old – she abbreviates the name to _Rey_ for reasons of easier transportation – and a varnished cypresswood traveling case that contains an antique white mantilla veil made from bobbin lace and stitched with a hundred seed pearls about its edges. It is pressed clean and stored between sheaves of paper.

Rey puts it on and stands before the mirror, sometimes, and when her face provides no answers to the questions she has asked herself she folds up the veil and locks it back inside the box.

…

2.

He has an empire with no proper heraldry or peerage that could recognize him as its emperor, which sounds like the opening dilemma in a tragedy about some royal usurper but is in fact the simple truth of his new-blood nation and its noble houses built upon depthless want and the incalculable sums of wealth that cannot fill it, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller and Carnegie and Skywalker of Skywalker Steel.

Ben signs his full name with extravagant, furious penmanship on the checks, _Benjamin Skywalker Organa-Solo_ : they form a tidy audit trail through a futile, misspent youth that is punctuated by several reckless fights - the one that scars his face when he is twenty-three lands him in jail for ten days and teaches him nothing - and ends at the long-delayed age of twenty-nine with the death of his father and his uncle and his mother all in the same eighteen months.

The name runs on the front page of every national newspaper a year later, as well, when it comes to light that his corporation’s chairman – Snoke has been in Ben’s life since Ben was a child, really, holding a glass of wine at banquets and standing improperly close and speaking to him in the serious, confiding tone of one adult to another even when Ben was ten years old – has been covering an accounting fraud of several billion dollars and bankrupted a company founded by the son of a penniless immigrant.

When his creditors and lawyers are at last done with him, when the psychiatric hospital has released him, the only things left to Benjamin Skywalker Organa-Solo’s name are a safety deposit box, paid for by his grandfather’s estate for the past forty years, and a mansion in Newport, Rhode Island.

It has fifty rooms and they are all empty.

…

3.

Mr. Trepio has been the Skywalker-Organa family’s secretary and translator for longer than Ben has been alive, although this age has never revealed itself on his sun-bronzed and taciturn face. He sits with Ben in a cleared-out office and watches him open the safety deposit box, sitting patient and without commentary when Ben’s hands shake too hard to insert the key at his first and second tries.

Inside is a contract bearing the signature of Anakin Skywalker on one line; on the other is the name of the foreign investor who advanced the original capital for the company’s foundation, in exchange for a majority share in its stock, and it executes their standing agreement that any children or grandchildren who might arise from their respective lineages should be wedded when the two parties come of age.

Ben laughs. Trepio does not.

Emperor Sheev Palpatine never had any children, Ben says, and then he starts to cry so hard he slumps out of his chair and bows his marred face to the floor with the useless paper still in his hands. The sobs suck and gutter in his chest. 

Well, sir, Trepio starts, after a very long time.

Well, sir, now that you should mention it.

…

4.

Rey is living in a London flat she pays for with three different jobs when she receives the American’s letter.

She spends two days rankling under its superior, freezing transactional tone, but to his credit Mr. Organa-Solo has also sent the cost of a two-way plane ticket along with a set of directions written neatly on a slip of notebook paper, and so before Rey stamps up the gravel pathway to his hollowed-out mansion by the sea she dons the pearl-stitched lace veil of her disgraced ancestry.

A small white-haired dog and a large black-haired man are waiting for her on the house’s front steps; the dog wears a padded green vest that reads SERVICE DOG – DO NOT PET in bold letters and a tag that proclaims his name to be Diogenes, like the cynic Greek philosopher who once said no man can be hurt except by himself.

The man called Ben wears a dark coat, despite the mild spring day, and hesitates before taking Rey’s hand when she offers it.

Rahab, Rey Palpatine says, by way of an introduction. Like the woman from Jericho, but really I’m just Rey. 

Benjamin, Ben Solo says. Like the son of Jacob, but really I’m just Ben. 

They spend an hour walking the cliffs above the gray, empty beach before saying much of anything else, mutually restrained by the archaic peculiarity of their situation. Rey goes down to the shore and lifts translucent yellow jingleshells and bits of green seaglass to put them in her pockets; Ben pitches stone after smooth stone out upon the flat water, to watch them skip and sink, until Rey manages to imitate his gesture.

My father taught me, Ben says. And don’t let me talk you into playing craps or blackjack because he taught me those, too. 

I never knew them, Rey says, after she has cast a stone and counted its dispersing ripples. My parents, I mean – I might as well be nobody. I came all this way here to tell you that.

I never really knew my family either, Ben says, not until it was too late to change anything – I wanted you to be here in person when I told you that.

The sky turns from stark white to sullen gray, and as they come up the broad lawn of the mansion again it begins to rain. Ben swings off his coat, without comment or change of expression, throws it over the priceless veil in Rey’s hair, and they run the final stretch back into the house together.

…

5.

It was started as an old Gilded Age practice, naturally, although usually the story happened in reverse; the hard-palmed sons of America, grown abruptly rich beyond any understanding of what to do about it, would teach their daughters to sit and smile and pour their tea and then would wed them to the European nobleman who, in exchange for the security of wealth, would grant the daughters a title, a specious dignity, a history going back a thousand years.

But Ben has no wealth, of course, and Rey has no throne or altar upon which to seat her glittering, meaningless honorific, and thus the only dowries they could give to one another are themselves. 

They both manage to laugh over this while they dry off in the glass-paneled sun parlor where Padme Amidala-Skywalker once grew her hothouse flowers. They make two cups of instant coffee for one another to warm themselves up, eat biscotti from a plastic three-pack Ben has bought at the convenience store – they split the final one in half, after some debate – and watch Diogenes called Dio chase a bounding tennis ball across the empty red marble ballroom.

They retire to separate bedrooms and walk along the cliffs the next day, and the next. Ben shows her an old speaking-tube system that runs all through the house from its pantry to its attic; they exchange garbled messages into the brass receivers and their shy, disused laughter echoes. Rey teaches him the fluent phrases of British Sign Language she would often use across the orphanage’s dormitory rooms after the lights were turned out, the gestures for hello and goodbye and friend and several insults not intended for civilized conversation. 

On the seventh day she is readying to pack her luggage into the cypresswood traveling case which can fit everything she owns in the world, the veil laid atop the rest, and Ben takes her hand.

Would you like to stay anyway, Ben says, will you stay?

Rey looks at him.

Yes, she says.

Yes. 

…


End file.
